a life's work

today

This feels like a familiar feeling that I can’t remember feeling before. The pain comes and goes, typical of waves of grief, where sometimes there’s nothing at all and you go through an entire day without thinking anything of it. Then you wake up the next day and it’s present, surrounding you like a body that used to lie beside you.

Today I woke up with it. And I couldn’t move, so dense was the presence. Hours later, pressed by life which has no regard for feelings, I got out of bed and did something, anything. I tried to remember the world, my work, my family, my…you know. The other things that are supposed to help the assuaging. I left the dead body where it belonged.

Then it hit me again, when I was watching one of my favourite shows, and it was nothing, nothingness, really. One of the characters has cancer, and her husband is telling her it is going to be ok. He hugs her, and the specific way she holds his arm is the way I used to hold his, and the wave is here, and the dead body is back, scraping its withered bony finger over a well worn crack in my heart.